


there's a fire starting in my heart

by soaringrachel



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gen, some sex and violence mentioned but none of it's graphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-19
Updated: 2012-10-19
Packaged: 2017-11-16 15:32:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/541034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soaringrachel/pseuds/soaringrachel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>River maybe hates him or she maybe loves him or maybe after all this time she just doesn't care.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there's a fire starting in my heart

**Author's Note:**

> Once again for the OTP challenge I've been doing. Except this somehow grew out of the prompt "kissing".
> 
> I have no idea what I'm doing with my life.
> 
> (blatantly stealing titles from song lyrics is more obvious when they're popular songs, oops)

She hates him.

She still fucking hates him, after all this, after a thousand rounds of who killed who.

She presses her lips to his, presses _hard_ , can’t press hardest ‘cause she’s already done that.

She presses her lips to his—how did she put it—young and impressionable, starts up his heart with her own.

She thinks she might be in love.

God, she hates him.

 “Hello, sweetie,” she says, and it takes her a second to call up the catchphrase.

“River!” he says, pleased as fucking punch, and she lowers the gun.

She doesn’t find them, or they don’t find her. Be sweet to think, wouldn’t it? Amy got to be a mommy after all.

She lives on the streets, though. She doesn’t know her name (that comes back later) or who she is (that takes even longer) or why the hell she’s doing any of this (that never does), but she knows she has to kill the Doctor.

There’s an epidemic of kindly pediatricians found bloody and dead for a few years.

Doctor River Song fucks men she picks up in bars and women she picks up in libraries and makes sure not to check her book of faces.

She lets them go with red lines scraped down their backs and red paint swiped across their lips, lies back in bed and grades papers with red ink.

When she sees him she pushes him, forces him to his knees, but it’s no good; he’s delighted.

 “Are you his wife?” Amy asks, and River wants to cry, because she knows her mother’s idea of _his wife_.

Missing him when he’s there doesn’t turn out to be all that different from missing him when he’s gone.

It does remind her she’s supposed to kill him.

When she’s sixteen she remembers, or realizes, who the Doctor is.

She feels kinda bad for those pediatricians.

(The next day she gets a flash of red hair and the name of a town, and she starts saving up to cross the ocean.)

No, by the way, it doesn’t help that he hates himself just as much.

It makes it worse—she wants to throw the tantrums she never did as a child, stamp her feet and shout “No! That’s mine! You can’t have that!”

She wants to hold him close and kiss him and tell him it’ll be all right.

It should’ve been you, she never, ever tells Amy.

River tugs on her own hair and winces, doesn’t cry.

She kisses people who aren’t him and pretends it’s revenge, pretends it’s penance, pretends it’s anything but just liking the feel of lips on hers.

She kisses him and pretends it’s love, pretends it’s hate, pretends _obsession_ is something unique to River Song.

She knows she’s not the first; hell, she’s met some of them, here and there. She babysat Rose Tyler once when she was six, watched her play in the street for an evening while she waited for the Time Agency to catch up. She seemed nice, and curious, and very very much not River. (“It’s just his tenth regeneration,” she tells herself, “he must’ve gone a bit funny,” but he’s still in love with all the rest of them and she knows he’s a good liar.)

They never bring it up, her mother and the Doctor. Well. If anyone was going to, Rory would, and Rory doesn’t, doesn’t say to his daughter, “Your mother might’ve been in love with your husband,” doesn’t ever say, “he might’ve been in love with her.”

(He wasn’t, River knows, because River knows him and when the Doctor falls, he falls hard, whether he fell for her or not.)

(She was, River knows, because sometimes _family_ means no one needs to bring it up.)

She wears the kind of shoes that can kill a man and the kind of clothes that do worse, and she never thinks about why.

She steers neater than a pin and hands over the wheel anyway and gets her husband drunk while he’s driving.

She’s the kind of girl that can tie a cherry stem with her tongue even when she’s a woman, and she’s the kind of woman you want to stay away from even when she’s a girl.

River’s never really been about _why_.

 

So “I think it just might kill me” turns out not to be a figure of speech; she isn’t fussed.

There’s killing for someone and there’s dying for someone, and it’s good for couples to have compatible skills.


End file.
